Santa Elena and San Simón

Santa Elena and San Simón

A stroll through the small town of Santa Elena reveals a juxtaposition of thousand-year-old traditions with contemporary living. Around the plaza, women grind corn for the daily supply of tortillas using a 2,000-year-old recipe, while their children post their latest status on their social network page at the nearby cybercafé. Santa Elena has been continuously inhabited by Yucatec Maya people for the past 1,500 years. The town's Maya name, Nohcacab, means "the great place of good land." The majority of the people in Santa Elena live a traditional Maya way of life and they speak their native language, Yucatec Mayan. Subsistence farming, yielding the staple crops of corn, beans, and squash, provides the basis of the family diet. Meals are complemented with tomato, various kinds of chiles and other native plants, along with meat from farm and wild animals, including chickens, turkeys, pigs and iguanas. Many of the town’s youth attend local schools and nearby technical colleges and universities; whereas the adults, both men and women, work on a variety of jobs related to tourism, agriculture, and the restoration of archaeological sites of the Puuc region.

This aerial view of Nohcacab shows the town's Catholic church located above the central plaza.

Ideum/UC Regents

Iguanas abound, are caught, and eaten.

Ideum/UC Regents

The design, materials, and construction techniques of the traditional Maya home shown here have remained unchanged for more than 1,200 years. Wood for Maya homes is cut only during full Moon to ensure the beams will be strong and resistant to wood-boring insects.

José Huchim Herrera

The patio of the family home of Don Hernán Perera Novero and Doña Felicita Huchin Itzá. They grow, and have working knowledge of, more than 80 medicinal plants native of the Yucatán.

José Huchim Herrera

A traditional Maya family altar, where ceramic statues from Maya ancestors are displayed side by side with Catholic icons. Corn is everywhere around the house.

José Huchim Herrera

Don Hernán displays his harvest of corn and squash from the family milpa. The ears of corn rest on an altar where he places offerings of Sac Ha'. The offering is for the "owners of the milpa," called "aluxo'ob" in Mayan.

José Huchim Herrera

A ceiba, several hundred years old, stands at the center of San Simón, a village of 500 people under the political structure of Santa Elena. Maya spaces are traditionally defined by the relationship between Earth and sky and the four cardinal directions. In Maya cosmology, the ceiba is the axis mundi, or world tree, that connects Earth and sky.

José Huchim Herrera

Don Porfirio Colli of San Simón harvests corn in his milpa.

José Huchim Herrera

Three hundred years of combined wisdom from Maya elders. Doña Natalia Canul Che' (left), Don Eleuterio Tzek Caamal, and Doña Francisca Uc Colli shared their knowledge of medicinal plants and astronomy. They told of "tzab" and how they waited for the "rattle of the snake" to appear in the eastern horizon right before sunrise to time the planting of corn.